I didn't text you back because I was trying to find you a date

+ matchmaking penpal option for people who live outside SF/NY!

Nicolas de Staël, Marine la nuit, 1954.

Housekeeping: matchmaking is open and we’ve added a penpal option for people who don’t live in SF or New York. If you live in SF/NY but you would prefer to get a penpal instead of an IRL match, you can select the “Other” option for location.

A few weeks ago I went to an event where a woman who’s been matchmaking for 10 years gave a great piece of advice: don’t look at how hot someone is when setting them up, look at how hot their exes are. That’s a good way to account for charisma.

Some people are happy to send me pictures of their exes while others are more shy. I’m quickly learning that most people aren’t good at verbally describing their type. Some are. Some people say: I want a wiry green-eyed guy who’s in his early 30s, a rock climber who would drop acid with me. Those people are the best.

If you lined up all the pictures of my exes, you would definitely see a throughline. Dark-haired, tall, square jaw. Though I am perfectly happy to deviate wildly from type. I think the whole point of love is that you’re sometimes wildly surprised by yourself.

N said to me that I should set S up with a girl who’s really intense because he’s like a rock, so stable. I should probably ask N whether he thinks I’m really intense. I think I’ve learned to modulate my intensity a lot over the years and now I’m addicted to yoga, spend a shocking amount of my time at the dog park, basically camp out at my desk with my laptop all day. The matchmaking stresses me out a ton, but in a good way: it’s an outlet for my frenetic energy.

By the way I’m trying to set N up so if you know any cute AI researchers, hit me up. They don’t have to actually be AI researchers, though he is one. It’s more like they have to be compatible with his type of mind. N is totally singular and he sort of looks like a cherub.

I feel really nervous messaging total strangers about whether they’re single still. I messaged a girl on Instagram and she blocked me. It was a nice message, I think? I just said I would love to set her up but maybe she was in a relationship so she could let me know if she was into it. It’s been my resolution for the past two years to be more comfortable with micro-rejections like this. When I’m feeling nervous about it I just try to pretend that I’m a podcast host. Because lots of people like listening to podcasts but nobody wants to be on (most) podcasts so if you want to be a podcast host you have to ask every guest, like, 30 times, and sometimes they might get mad at you for asking. That’s the level of comfort I’m trying to achieve.

A girl told me that I’m better at picking people for her than she is at picking people for herself. I was so touched by that. I’m naturally bossy—like, when I was 10 I was trying to convince my parents to relocate to Seattle and get jobs in tech there so we could save on my tuition when it was time (I was sure I would go to college in the US). They were like, What? A lot of the dating advice aimed at women tells you to be submissive and undemanding, and even as a teenager I could tell it wasn’t worth the effort for me personally. My great-grandmother on my dad’s side, who lived to 104, was very bossy (she had mellowed out by the time I met her, in her 90s). So is my paternal grandmother and my aunt. And so is my mom and her mom and my great-grandmother on her side. And these are only the women I know about.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my ancestors, but it’s interesting to imagine a girl just like me hanging out in China 200 years ago. When I read Sei Shonagan’s The Pillow Book, I really thought: she’s just like me. Though of course she lived in Heian Era Japan. I love the idea of court gossip from 1000 years ago being fresh and exciting today. Phyllis Rose: Gossip is the beginning of moral inquiry.

I have a multi-tiered system for categorizing gossip, from low security to high. The lowest tier is basically an anecdote passed to me by someone else, like: Hey, did you hear that Kailey and Mark broke up? Interesting, harmless, can be repeated. It can also be an observation that I have made about someone: Was the vibe between Tina and Mary off at dinner? The middle tier consists of things directly told to me that can only be circulated between close friends. For example, Becca might tell me, and then she might separately tell Laurie, and then Laurie and I can discuss at length. And the upper tier is things told to me in extreme confidence that absolutely cannot be repeated or circulated.

S once accused me once of picking friends based on their adjacency to great gossip. I said there are worse things to be hungry for than good anecdotes.

Tonight I went to a party and found myself talking about—guess what—marriage and friendship. I really like talking to people about relationships and sometimes I’m like—am I boring? Do I need more finely developed takes on China? I’m interested in other things too, but I guess I’ve proved to be monomaniacal than I expected. I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.

Subscriber writing

Welcome to our first installment of subscriber writing! I’ll try to do a round of these once every two weeks.

1. Megha writes about “the trend of hosting cafés at home. it's a loving roast & look into why we need to turn our apartment into a coffee shop just to invite friends over.”

2. SJ writes about choosing to thrive rather than merely survive life.

3. David writes about living and loving a boring life.

4. Sara writes about “people-pleasing, the belief that love is something to earn, and the courage to embrace vulnerability in a world that glorifies indifference.”

5. Vivian writes about “exploring the gap between our fantasies of a place and the reality behind them, through the stories of Miyazaki and Shinkai.”

6. Irem writes about “how books and free play help us simulate adult life, and my worry that replacing them with their technology-mediated forms is making it harder for Gen Z to transition to adulthood.”